On Monday afternoon, as MAAC champion Niagara and 64 other teams prepared to play in the NCAA tournament, coach Tim O’Toole sat in his office and contemplated what could have been. He had just finished meeting individually with each of his players,who were still sore-hearted from their season-ending 76-74 loss to Rider in the MAAC tournament semifinals over a week earlier.
“This is my least favorite day of the year,” he said. “It is every year.”
This year, though, was in a way unlike previous years. This year the Stags were coming off back -to-back 19-win seasons, last year’s total having come without the team’s leading scorer (Terrance Todd ’06) and perhaps the greatest player in school history (Deng Gai ’05) for the second half of the season.
The Stags played a tough non-conference schedule that included tournament participants Mississippi State, Alabama A’M (although slated as a 22 gazillion-to-one long shot to win it all) and George Washington, and managed to come out of it alive and well, going 1-2 including a narrow, four-point loss to what was then the 12th ranked team in the country.
If that wasn’t enough, it looked as if they were in the MAAC driver’s seat when they returned home with a chance to win the league’s regular season title without having to leave the state more than once.
But a four-game homestand that should have had Stag-fever spreading rapidly throughout campus yielded the following results: no wins, four losses; two half-time leads that disappeared; one face-to-face shouting match between O’Toole and St. Peter’s coach Bob Leckie; and one concession stand fire that caused the Arena to be evacuated.
Not exactly the results they hoped for, but still good enough that wins against Iona and Loyola put them in position to do some damage in the league tournament. After beating two-time defending champion Manhattan, they had a date with Rider for a trip to the nationally televised championship game – a step away from going where no Stags team in the past eight years has gone.
But in the final seconds of the game and with the Stags trailing by two, DeWitt Maxwell’s ’06 12-foot jumper seemed to epitomize the Stags’ season. It looked good off his fingers, but then hit the back iron before falling to the floor.
So as he stood in a dorm room and watched one of countless tournament preview shows on ESPN, Michael Van Schaick ’07, who emerged from a seldom used freshman to a sophomore who started nearly half of the Stags’ games, tried to make sense of the situation.
“We thought we had a really good chance,” he said. “But we just couldn’t make it happen. We had some tough breaks, but a few stops and we would have been right there at 19-11 again.”
Van Schaick and his teammates now face a daunting task: win next year without Gai, who finished his career tied for sixth on the all-time NCAA shot blocking list, and senior point guard Tyquawn Goode, a tenacious on-the-ball defender and the team’s emotional leader.
“It was a tough way for this class to end,” said O’Toole. “They gave us so much. [But] I’m excited for next year because we have good kids and we have something to prove.”
If the Stags are to prove what are sure to be many skeptics wrong, they’ll have to do it with a balanced attack, O’Toole said, which starts and finishes with rising seniors Todd, Maxwell, Carter and Michael Bell.
Bell, with his red and white basketball shoes sitting on the floor next to his bed, watched the televised madness with a sense of hunger for his last shot at a dance ticket.
“We can talk all we want about having something to prove,” he said, “but we have to go out and actually do it.”
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